March 2: Saint Marty at a Loss

Well, I don't have a lot of time left in this work day to write anything deep, reflective, sarcastic, or funny.  I had plans to get a lot more accomplished today, but it just didn't happen.  So, I'm going to just open up my journal and type up whatever I find.

Here goes...

As a young child in Detroit, I went to a private Catholic school, as did my eight siblings.  My sister, Rose, who is two years older than me, has Down's syndrome.  She went to the special education classes.

Every year, the Shriners took a bus-load of kids from the special education classes to the circus, and I always went along with them because my mother was usually a chaperon or helper.  The day of the circus field trip, we would pile into the school bus, and it usually took forever.  Some of the kids were in wheelchairs and had other mobility issues.  So I would sit in the back of the bus as they loaded students, and my friends would see me.  They would laugh, point, shout names at us--"Ricky Retardo," "Circus Freak," "Special Eds."  It was constant, and, for me, it lasted for days afterward.

It got to the point where I hated circus day, even though my sister was always thrilled to have me along with her classmates.

It gave me a taste of what my sister faced every day of her life.

So, it's not very polished,  It's not funny.  But you have something to read.  Something better tomorrow, I hope.

Saint Marty has to get going.

January 31: Saint John Bosco

John Bosco is the patron saint of editors.  I can find no reason in his biography why he holds this title.  I was expecting him to have started a famous Catholic newspaper or edited the work of some great theologian.  At the very least, I expected him to be a writer of some renown.  He wasn't.  Born in 1815 in Turin, Italy, John was the son of sheep herders.  In fact, he spent much of his childhood tending livestock in the fields.  When he was about to enter the seminary, his mother told him, "If at any time you come to doubt your vocation, I beseech you, lay it aside at once.  I would rather have a poor peasant for my son than a negligent priest."

Since I'm writing this blog post about him, John Bosco obviously did NOT become a poor peasant or a negligent priest.  He founded two religious orders--the Salesian Society of St. Francis de Sales and the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians--both dedicated to the "care of young boys and girls."  Plus, it only took him 46 years to be elevated to the status of sainthood.  Considering the fact that some people wait hundreds of years for that distinction, John Bosco's canonization was like a hundred yard dash.

I really like the advice of John Bosco's mother.  Basically, it boils down to this:  if you can't do something right, don't do it at all.  Of course, it probably sounded a lot prettier in Italian.  I agree with her.  I hate doing any task in a half-ass manner.  If I'm involved with any project, if my name is going to be associated with it, I want it to be done well.

I could stop writing there.  After all, John Bosco is the patron saint of editors, so I'm sure he would appreciate the brevity and concision.  There is wisdom in what I have already written for young and old alike.  But, of course, I'm not going to leave it there.  It's too easy.  Too pat.

So, let me tell you a little story about my years in a PhD program at a prominent Michigan university.  I was taking a graduate-level fiction workshop.  I already had a Master's degree in fiction writing, so I felt pretty confident about my abilities.  I submitted a story to be workshopped.  On the night my piece was to be critiqued, the professor did what she normally did:  sat back, scratched her snaky mane of black curls, and said, "So what do you guys think?"  It wasn't an actual invitation for anyone in the class to speak.  This was our opportunity to wait for her to pronounce judgement, like Nero in the Colosseum.  After a minute of uncomfortable silence and shuffling papers, she opened her pinched mouth and said something along the lines of, "This story belongs in a high school class, not my graduate level fiction master seminar."  I'm sure what she said was more tactful than that, but the result was the same.  She had drawn first blood.  What ensued was an hour-long feeding frenzy.  When graduate student writers sense weakness, they turn on each other like teenage boys at a dodge ball game.  They do this either to deflect attention from their own inadequacies, or to draw attention to their ability to agree with the professor's opinion the most.  At the end of my hour of glory, I felt raw, exposed, eviscerated.  When the class took a break, I packed up my books and left.

I didn't retire to the fields of Turin to tend sheep, but I wasn't able to write fiction again for almost three years.  To this day, when I show off a story I've written, I have the impulse to immediately apologize for it.  A few months ago, when I was cleaning out a desk drawer, I found a copy of my infamous story from that painful night.  I have to admit, it wasn't the best thing I've ever written, but it wasn't that bad, either.

What I learned from that experience is that, as a teacher, I have the power to build up or completely crush my student's confidence and self-esteem.  I try to keep in mind the hurt I felt that night when I now enter the classroom as an instructor.  I don't want to inflict the same trauma on any of the boys and girls in my charge.  John Bosco would appreciate that, I think.

And my professor?  That bitch won the National Book Award for fiction.  Go figure.

October 27: Saint Namatius

I often wonder what kind of legacy I'm going to leave behind.  As a writer, of course, I want to leave behind a few books that people are still reading fifty or a hundred years after I die.  As a father, I want to be remembered by my daughter and son as a presence of love and support.  I want my daughter to remember the nights I read Charlotte's Web to her, doing character voices, making her imagine the manure pile in Wilbur's barn.  I want my son to remember the nights I sang him to sleep, rubbing his head and back like I was polishing a delicate flute of Waterford crystal.  As a teacher, I want my students to remember me as a person who taught them how to live better lives (and hopefully avoid comma splices).  As a Christian, I honestly don't know what my legacy is going to be.  It may be this blog, floating out in cyberspace like a note floating in a bottle in the Pacific.  Forever unread.

The saints who intrigue me the most are the ones whose biographies start out something like this:  "Not much is known about Saint Joe Schmo..."  It's as if their entire lives are empty chalkboards, and, yet, they're regarded holy enough to be saints.  That's astounding to me.  That would be like me winning the Nobel Prize in Literature because the members of the Swedish Academy heard from a friend's cousin that I'm a good writer.  It just doesn't work that way.

Last night, I started teaching a spiritual journaling workshop.  It was a good first night, with a lot of sharing of stories and backgrounds.  The focus of the session was trying to define what our "present periods" are and how we all go about trying to preserve our histories and pasts.  At one point in the evening, we discussed cemeteries  and how visiting one gives you a sense of clarity and peace.  I have been a cemetery stalker for a long time (not in the Ouija board, chicken blood sense).  I find strolling among headstones, reading names, noting birth and death dates, grounds me.  It reminds me of how trivial most of the things that occupy my days really are.  And it also reminds me that, when I'm long gone from this little rock of a planet, the only physical reminder that I've walked, breathed, spoken, took craps, loved my wife and children, or wrote poetry is going to be a piece of marble with my name chiseled into it.  That's it.  For a majority of the residents of cemeteries, that's the sum total of their legacies.  A slab of cold stone.

That's not a very comforting thought.  To be honest, it scares the shit out of me.  I guess I haven't quite left behind the ten-year-old boy who wanted to be the next Stephen King.  I can't shake the fantasy that, one day, some huge literary agent is going to stumble across my blog and send me an e-mail with these words in the subject line:  "YOU ARE THE BE$T WRITER I'VE EVER READ!  PLEA$E LET ME REPRE$ENT YOU!"  Or something like that.  I'm not sure if this scenario is a reflection of my stubborn refusal to accept reality or a genuine possibility for a lucrative, successful writing career.  I just don't want to give up my dream, because, without my dream, I'm just one step away from being Al Bundy in my own version of Married With Children.

Which brings me back to my original question of what  my legacy is going to be, the thing or things for which I'm going to be remembered.  If I'm remembered at all.  I'm not a saint.  I will never be a saint.  I can't imagine doing anything for a sustained period that even remotely resembles being saintly.  Let me give you an example:  today's feast is for Namatius, a man who was the Bishop of Clermont, France, in the 400s.  Namatius and his wife (yes, Catholic bishops were allowed to marry at one time) are best known for building cathedrals filled with beautiful artwork.  His wife created the Bible of the Poor--"sacred images figuratively transcribed from the revealed texts."  Basically, she created picture book Bibles on church walls for the illiterate poor.  By the way, none of this information is first-hand.  This stuff comes from stories told by Saint Gregory of Tours about Namatius and his wife, which, in my book, is like being nominated for sainthood by a nephew of the chief saint-maker committee guy.  (There's an actual title, I believe, but you get the idea.)  The point is:  legacy is tied to memory, and memory is subject to human failings (like too many Jell-O shots at a Halloween party).  I'm not saying Saint Gregory got it wrong on Namatius.  He probably didn't.  But who's to know?

So, I'm just going to keep writing my posts, taking care of my family, and dreaming.  Who knows what could happen?  I don't think there's a patron saint for bloggers yet.  Now I just have to find someone to nominate me after I'm gone.

You know, the nephew of that chief saint-maker committee guy.